Coffee Sourcing, Industry Growth and Prioritization
Cafe culture is pervasive throughout America. It is hard to go to any city and not stop at a Starbucks or ask around to find the best cup around. These days you can't even set foot in a new place without google or foursquare notifying you immediately of the spots that everyone is raving about. Since the late 90s, quality of coffee service has been on the rise with people starting to pay more attention to where their coffee is coming from. As this focus is shifting to quality and origin, the middle men who traded behind the scenes of the coffee bar are finally getting to step into the light. This transition allows them to establish their companies in a more public-facing way and create deeper and more individualist brands. Seeing the market evolve and grow is the coolest part of being an afficiando.
While coffee buyers have always been around in a mostly mercantile manner focusing on managing the import/export balance, the last 10 years have seen a more skilled and quality-driven middle-man emerge. With so many different concerns to focus on ranging from environmental sustainability to socio-economic justice and then not to mention the individual characteristics and political requirements of each origin, navigating these worlds to build economic bridges to a modern first-world is truly a full time job.
Sweet Marias, Red Fox and Royal Crown are the first three to pop into my mind. All are bay-area based sourcing companies focused on sourcing the best quality coffee around the world. Integral to each sourcing company are three main departments -
- Green Coffee Buying, which is on the ground at origin looking for and investing in producers, working with cooperatives to improve crop quality at all stages of growth from planting through post-harvest processing
- Shipping and Logistics departments who clear the red tape and get all the certifications necessary for a long and complex voyage by ship and are also responsible for traceability
- Quality Control and Roasting who taste the coffees every day and discover the ideal roasts, identify and remove any defects that show themselves in the later stages of roasting before the final consumption and generally maintain the integrity of a coffee program through comprehensive and ceaseless sensory analysis
Of course to be a modern company these days you also require HR, Finance, Customer Service, Marketing and Sales, but with all these jobs that drive quality and production, it is crazy to imagine adding the complexities of cafe service to a docket already this packed.
Where do Coffee Sourcing exclusive companies go from here? and How are they differentiating themselves?
Sweet Marias focuses on providing green beans and equipment to help hobbyist home brewers. This means they sell green coffee at every size and host forums for swapping roast profiles and techniques. They have tutorial for roasting as well as an extensive history on the roasting of coffee available to their users. This makes it a great place for anyone starting to roast and develop their coffee knowledge and skills regardless of whether they are based in the bay area or not. They also offer the most comprehensive green bean menu currently with 85 unique origins to select from allowing both hobbyists and small startups to develop their skills broadly. Each coffee origin has meticulously noted stories which include location, altitude, farm and farmer history as well as specific growing and processing details.
Here's the link to their very thorough Coffee Glossary which makes a great tool for referencing any varietal, processing method or sensory terminology!
Royal Coffee is an importer that has been around since 1978. They are established in Seattle, Madison, Oakland, Shanghai and Houston, not to mention their e-store which ships anywhere. For any company to be 38 years old but have success at expanding and maintaining a modern and relevant brand is a feat in itself, especially in any food related business where the attention is laser focused on marketing and branding. To me it shows a commitment to their service that surpasses current fads. Lately Royal has been experimenting and expanding their brand by opening The Crown: Royal Coffee Lab & Tasting Room. This expansion marks the beginning of a new direction for Royal focusing on #OpenSourceCoffee. The Crown is meant to foster collaboration through experimentation and connecting. Richard Sandhlin, GM of The Crown aims to funnel this mostly tech-inspired sense of creativity and said,
#OpenSourceCoffee isn’t just the creation of content - it is the radical sharing of what we learn along the way. With open source, we look forward to being changed by the industry, as much as we help to spark new ideas & excitement...We hope to be the place to incubate new ideas, spark collaboration and have a venue to bridge all of the gaps in specialty coffee. We are #OpenSourceCoffee.
In addition to building this amazing lab that I cannot wait to participate in, Royal also keeps a vibrant and rigorously informative blog. One of their recent posts highlights price volatility with the stock market charts in fluctuation and decline and gives a green buyers perspective on what these charts translate to when negotiating prices to farmers. I am all about seeing transparency like this, getting to peek into the though processes that lead to any delicious cup of coffee or bar of chocolate. Keep crushing it Royal!
Red Fox is another bay area based coffee sourcer, yet their brand stands alone. They pride themselves in being a "highly focused sourcing business, dedicated to uncovering rare and unique green coffees in the harder-to-reach, under-sourced origins of East Africa and South America." The countries they specialize in working with are Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Peru, Bolivia, Kenya, Rwanda and Ethiopia. What piqued my interest in their brand is the old world feel they are building upon while still modernizing their offerings. Their layout and format on their coffee offerings is super clean and easy to trace. When you hover over the different coffee a short message pops up that includes region, farmer, coop, altitude, process, fermentation, drying method, tasting notes and score. Their list is clean and enjoyable to use. They also have the total available amount of each coffee listed. I appreciate the brevity of their website. Everything is collapsed into 5 pages and everything you need from them is available while still maintaining that old world air of mystery.
These three sourcing companies represent just a few of the many directions possible in a growing industry. I love how they are embracing the challenges that face their farmers and are working to empower them and educate their consumer about concerns farmers face beyond low pay and access to social resources, concerns like climate change and global pollution. Coffee has been around as a cultural bonding activity since forever, and as the market grows it is important for the dedicated consumer to participate in a more active role especially as growing regions are shifting in the modern climate. I have an amazing opportunity to serve Yemeni coffee at Blue Bottle this weekend with the man who snuck into Yemen determined to standardized and improve the coffee quality in one of the most historically important coffee growing regions with some very old heirloom varietals. I am planning to continue this exploration into different brand styles and points of focus for green coffee buyers and cocoa buyers. #OpenSourceCoffee FTW!!